I'm not even going to offer a rebuttal to that statement because if you can't see how dumb and empty that argument is, nothing I can say to you will help. The idea that "everyone who has ever done government work is 'in on the conspiracy to deceive the public about the topic of UFOs' is possibly the most vapid and hysterically paranoid argument that I've heard from anyone ever. Lots of people in the government have bucked the system to speak out and offer testimony regarding the reality of UFOs : Ruppelt, Keyhoe, Hynek, Hill, and on and on - you know this. And the simple fact that the government has bent over backwards to offer no support for, or confirmation of, anything these people have been saying...should be enough to convince anyone that these folks are going against 70 years of government denial regarding this subject. But somehow even the most rudimentary application of analytical reasoning escapes you.

So this is pretty funny - I started listening to an old Art Bell interview with John Keel today (and "John Keel worship" is why humanoidlord hates the ETH so much and favor's Keel's "extradimensional ultraterrestrial" idea instead).

And Keel said that the reason he rejected the ETH is because UFO sightings are so common, and have gone back in history for so long.

The problem is, that given what we now know about the prevalence of habitable worlds and their ancient ages, we should be expecting a lot of UFO sightings going back all the way to the dawn of human history.

So Keel's logic was all effed up: the ETH actually predicts the observed data.

I'm sure that'll fly right over humanoidlord's head though, because once somebody embraces an idea with religious fervor, logic and reason go right out the window.

I'm pretty sure Keel would be very annoyed by a lot of what is attributed to him these days. I've read a lot of his work, including much of the unpublished stuff on that awesome blog run by his friend Doug, and I often wonder where some of this stuff comes from. To a lesser extent (as far as I can tell), I think the same is true of Jacques Vallee. He has said he'd be disappointed if the UFO phenomenon was not caused by something a lot more interesting than nuts and bolts craft piloted by people from other planets. The things people manage to dream up out of that can be astonishing. I'm sure he is very annoyed by some of it.

So this is pretty funny - I started listening to an old Art Bell interview with John Keel today (and "John Keel worship" is why humanoidlord hates the ETH so much and favor's Keel's "extradimensional ultraterrestrial" idea instead).

And Keel said that the reason he rejected the ETH is because UFO sightings are so common, and have gone back in history for so long.

The problem is, that given what we now know about the prevalence of habitable worlds and their ancient ages, we should be expecting a lot of UFO sightings going back all the way to the dawn of human history.

So Keel's logic was all effed up: the ETH actually predicts the observed data.

I'm sure that'll fly right over humanoidlord's head though, because once somebody embraces an idea with religious fervor, logic and reason go right out the window.

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yeah there are trillions of earth-like planets in the milk way, yet somehow they only visit earth, what a wonderfull coincidence

I'm pretty sure Keel would be very annoyed by a lot of what is attributed to him these days. I've read a lot of his work, including much of the unpublished stuff on that awesome blog run by his friend Doug, and I often wonder where some of this stuff comes from. To a lesser extent (as far as I can tell), I think the same is true of Jacques Vallee. He has said he'd be disappointed if the UFO phenomenon was not caused by something a lot more interesting than nuts and bolts craft piloted by people from other planets. The things people manage to dream up out of that can be astonishing. I'm sure he is very annoyed by some of it.

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well you can look it up, everthing i have ever said is part of their works

yeah there are trillions of earth-like planets in the milk way, yet somehow they only visit earth, what a wonderfull coincidence

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How do you know they only visit earth?...Have you been on other planets to observe the lack of visitations first hand or did an alien visitor relay this information to you?...A claim like that, "they only visit earth", is really meaningless and can never be proven for or against...

How do you know they only visit earth?...Have you been on other planets to observe the lack of visitations first hand or did an alien visitor relay this information to you?...A claim like that, "they only visit earth", is really meaningless and can never be proven for or against...

well you can look it up, everthing i have ever said is part of their works

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Actually when I first joined up here, you were trying to get me to read Keel's books, and then you were forced to admit that you hadn't read them yourself - you were simply adhering to what you had heard about his works.

And if everything you've ever said was taken from Vallee and Keel, then you have no capacity for independent thought. That's just sad. Nobody should ever sacrifice their own original thought process to some perceived "authority figure."

Many billions of potentially life-supporting worlds in this galaxy alone, which are on average 2-3 billion years older than the Earth. Your subjective assessment of "ridiculous" is totally meaningless in this context. The ETH predicts that we'd be visited frequently and from times long before mankind even began keeping records. That's what appears to be happening.

It only makes "little sense" to you, apparently because your mind can't grasp words like "billions." That's understandable - big numbers like that are hard to grasp. But taking the next step and saying that it's ridiculous simply because you can't grasp it - that's where your ego defeats the logic of the situation: it is comprehensible - it's just not comprehensible to you.

The problem isn't that alien races might or might not be visiting - it's the number of times somebody thinks it's happening, or is lying, or faking, or is just nuts. All of which is far too many by anybody's reckoning.

NIDS and JB Alexander came out with the Precognitive Sentient Phenomenon notion about their experiences at Skinwalker - a lot of that to explain the inability of traditional observation and empirical science to make itself useful.
So when the NIDS crowd says something like that where's the hue and cry? Sounds a lot like Loki to me only couched in JBA-speke.

Bigfoot is now some trans-dimensional entity, even minus Stephanie Powers, to explain away his elusiveness. But mention that UFOs might not be what they appear to be, well that's just nuts.

The problem isn't that alien races might or might not be visiting - it's the number of times somebody thinks it's happening, or is lying, or faking, or is just nuts.

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Well humanoidlord references any and all claims of alien contact, lunches with aliens, spider crab aliens skittering across the road, etc., as fact - he apparently believes every single crazy alien story on the internet without the slightest skepticism. And what's worse - he credulously holds the most crazy stories up as evidence to support his Loki god notion. It seems to be incomprehensible to him that a lot of people love to make up crazy stories either to see how many idiots will actually believe them, or for a few minutes of undeserved attention. Some people are tricksters. No "extradimensional" omnipotent divine being with a perverse sense of humor required.

That's a counterfactual statement. Nobody can reasonably "reckon" how many visitations are "far too many" in a situation where we potentially have billions of neighboring civilizations that may have a capacity to travel here with the ease that you and I get take-out for lunch, and any number of them may have active on-going surveillance operations or other agendas here on our planet.

But I think that when you cull the data with some semblance of responsible skepticism and the various filters of misidentifications and military planes and so forth, then the number of actual AAV sightings is probably fairly small - because we know that 80-95+% of all "unidentified" flying object sightings are actually mundane things; the AAV portion that seems to represent nonhuman technology is probably less than 5% (possibly even less than 1%) of the total "UFO" data set.

NIDS and JB Alexander came out with the Precognitive Sentient Phenomenon notion about their experiences at Skinwalker - a lot of that to explain the inability of traditional observation and empirical science to make itself useful.
So when the NIDS crowd says something like that where's the hue and cry? Sounds a lot like Loki to me only couched in JBA-speke.

Bigfoot is now some trans-dimensional entity, even minus Stephanie Powers, to explain away his elusiveness. But mention that UFOs might not be what they appear to be, well that's just nuts.

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That's a twisted argument: first you malign the people who assign hocus-pocus explanations to the Skinwalker Ranch incidents or stories or whathaveyou, as well as Bigfoot (and I agree with this part - abandoning scientific reasoning is always a bad idea - and I raise objections whenever anybody raises this specter of superstition), but then you turn around and argue in favor of the idea that UFOs could be "something else" masquerading as solid aerial devices with surprisingly consistent performance characteristics.

Make up your mind. If you think it's silly and reckless to make up hand-wavy factless non-scientific explanations like "Precognitive Sentient Phenomenon" (which reads like meaningless word salad) for Skinwalker Ranch and Bigfoot, then it's silly and reckless to do the same thing with AAV reports.

Physical events have physical causes. And I see zero reason to think that if you see a large metallic disc hovering over the treeline and then dart out of view in the blink of an eye, that you saw something other than a large metallic disc hovering over the treeline that then darted out of view in the blink of an eye. Questioning our own unambivalent sensory perceptions is the road to madness (and absolutely awful explanatory hypotheses).

While the rational analytical thinkers in the field of ufology were fighting for a modicum of scientific legitimacy over the last few decades – and slowly but surely gaining some ground via the Kepler Mission findings and a few key advancements in theoretical physics, a subculture of folks who are mostly scientifically illiterate decided to abandon the scientific method entirely and posit an alternative supernatural explanation that kneecaps all of our efforts at gaining mainstream scientific credibility, which is the first step toward an actual scientific investigation of this subject.

*Note: this usage of the phrase turned out to be a perversion of its progenitor’s intentions (see: Greg Bishop), entirely attributable to ignorance and wishful thinking. Greg’s own understanding of his “co-creation hypothesis” boils down to perceptual psychology. Not some magical process where the human mind interacts with an unseen supernatural force to manifest physical objects in the sky, as others such as Gene Steinberg have repeatedly claimed.​

The general idea is the same: rather than manifestations of advanced nonterrestrial technology operating in our airspace, these folks are suggesting that anomalous aerial vehicles (AAVs) aka unidentified flying objects (UFOs) are instead the product of some kind of supernatural entity which is intentionally deceiving us to make us believe that we’re being visited by advanced alien civilizations.

If that sounds absurd to you, then you’re right – it is absurd. But people are actually saying this. And the people who believe in this medieval-style supernatural explanation are extremely patronizing and self-righteous about it – they want you to believe that your faculties of reason and scientific understanding are blinding you to the “one true supernatural reality” behind this phenomenon.

At first I listened to what these people had to say and tried to find a scientific model that would reflect their idea, without being BS. And some of the words they were using sounded like they might have some physical validity: words like “extradimensional” and “multidimensional” sounded akin to concepts in superstring theory, and M-theory, and the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics. So I started digging through the scientific literature to see if I could find some way that these folks might be right – to see if there could be hidden physical dimensions of reality for some inscrutable cosmic trickster to be hiding in, beyond the veil of human perception.

Here’s what I found.

While superstring theory and M-theory postulate additional spatial dimensions beyond the three that we know and love, all of those additional dimensions are compactified down to the size of the Planck length, 10^-35 meter, which is 10^20 times smaller than a proton. Obviously that’s vastly too small for any kind of matter or complex systems of any kind to exist. Also, there’s still zero evidence that superstring theory, M-theory, or Brane theory, reflect any physical reality; they remain entirely theoretical ideas bereft of supporting empirical evidence of any kind. Predictions of new phenomena offered by these theories, such as the production of microsingularities in high-energy particle collisions, have been tested at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and they’ve all failed. And deviations from the inverse square law of gravitational attraction at very short-range scales, which were predicted by some of these theories, have also been experimentally tested and they’ve failed as well.

So we find no evidence of small extra dimensions. What about large ones?

Physicists can explore the dynamics of higher physical dimensions very easily with the exquisitely reliable tools of mathematics. We covered one such paper which addresses precisely this subject in the Physics Frontiers podcast that we just recorded this weekend. It’ll be a few weeks before that episode is edited and uploaded, but here are the key findings:

In spacetimes with >3 spatial dimensions, no stable structures can exist: there are no stable orbits for bodies like planets to orbit stars because the force law becomes inverse-cubed or greater, and those force distributions don’t permit stable dynamic configurations. With higher spatial dimensions, an electron cannot stably orbit a proton, so even hydrogen cannot form. No system can exist in bound dynamic equilibrium, so no structures can exist, which rules out complexity. So obviously our region of the universe doesn’t possess any macroscopic higher spatial dimensions beyond the three we know.

What about higher dimensions of time? It turns out that with more than one dimension of time, there are two big problems. One, particles can’t achieve bound states because their energy carries them off in different directions through time; they can pass one another, but they can’t bind together because they’re always moving in different directions through time as well as space. And the second problem is even stranger: it’s impossible to make any predictions in a universe with more than one dimension of time. The result of every experiment would appear to be random. So if the same initial conditions yield random results, it’s hard to see how cognition could evolve in a spacetime with more than one dimension of time – there are no intelligible relationships to observe which can yield predictions about events, even when the initial conditions are identical to begin with. Obviously we don’t live within a region of the cosmos with more than one dimension of time.

But it is possible, according to some theoretical physics models, that our region of the universe is fundamentally different than other regions of the universe which are beyond the cosmic horizon of the observable sector of the universe. And perhaps our considerations of higher dimensions are flawed, and intelligent life of some kind could arise in those regions somehow.

They’d still have to travel from those regions beyond the horizon of our observable universe, to get here. So that hypothesis is still an extraterrestrial hypothesis. And the distances traveled are vastly greater than the interstellar or even intergalactic distances that are the key to the extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH), so the prevailing form of the ETH is extremely conservative by comparison.

Alright, so we’ve basically ruled out microscopic and macroscopic extra dimensions - but maybe there’s some kind of entity here on Earth that we can’t perceive for some reason. Let’s consider that.

Given that such a life form would have to exist within our 4D spacetime, it would have to evolve in some manner, just as we evolved from simple chemistry to organic matter to highly complex organisms. Here’s the problem: we see no signs of any unexplained evolutionary processes in the geological record. We have a reasonably complete record of our own evolutionary process, and those of the other life forms on the Earth. But we see no evidence of either unexplained organic evolutionary beings, or any kind of exotic signs of other forms of evolution such as electrical beings or acoustical beings, or anything else that makes geologists or archaeologists scratch their heads and say “that’s odd – this weird pattern in the rock strata or preserved residue of some kind, seems to change over geological timescales and grow more complex during such-and-such period.” We see no signs of evolving and unexplained organization. So if we’re sharing this planet with some kind of parallel-evolving entity of some kind, there are no signs of it. In other words, the geological record stands as evidence that such a thing does not exist.

That really only leaves us with one last unexplored possibility: that some humans figured out a means of spaceflight before we did, and left the planet for some reason, and now they’re coming back to check up on us from time to time.

Technically, that falls under the extraterrestrial hypothesis because they’re now visiting us from a region beyond the Earth, even though they originated here.

This hypothesis is actually impossible to rule out entirely at this point, because there could be a number of reasons why we might not have discovered evidence of their pre-exodus society yet – perhaps they hid it so well that we haven’t found it and may never find it, akin to Gobekli Tepe. Or perhaps some geological disaster sent their city to the bottom of the ocean eons ago, and nature did the rest to wash it away.

It seems very unlikely though. It took the massive industrial base that we had available in the 1960s to put astronauts on the Moon, and obviously there’s nothing like that in the archeological record. But the Egyptians built the pyramids without anything even remotely resembling the sophistication of our modern industrial infrastructure, so we can’t be 100% sure that there isn’t some way to escape the Earth’s gravity using some clever technique that has somehow evaded modern scientific understanding. And I’ve heard stories about ancient texts from India that are said to describe strange flying vehicles. Maybe one day we’ll discover some lift principle that could be exploited with fairly primitive technology, and ferry some humans out of the Earth’s gravity well. It seems extremely implausible, but I wouldn’t have believed that the ancient Greeks had built a form of analogue computer, if we hadn’t discovered the Antikythera mechanism. So I try to keep an open mind.

Alternatively, maybe some of our ancestors made friends with some visiting extraterrestrials, and went off to explore the universe for awhile, and now they’re coming back to see how we’re doing.

But there again, we’re back to a variant of the ETH.

This was all much longer than I would’ve liked, but I wanted to be thorough, because it’s notoriously difficult to kill a bad idea once it gets going. Sorta like gangrene. Notice how people are still talking about Ronald Reagan’s absurd “trickle-down economics” idea 40 years later, even though it’s a well-proven hoax because economics does not now, nor has it ever, actually worked that way.

This thread stands as a challenge to the humanoidlord’s and the Gene Steinberg’s of the world, who are now set upon to offer some variant of this “extradimensional ultraterrestrial trickster” idea that does not grossly contradict all logic and reason and the wealth of empirical data at our disposal.

Shows us a way that this idea can actually work, without contradicting what we know to be fact.

Or admit that you have no idea how your own theory works, and then stfu about it until you do.

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Bravo Thomas..... Excellent thread and as often is the case, I can find nothing to disagree with whatsoever. In fact , if I were half as knowledgeable and articulate as you undoubtedly are my friend... I would have created a thread very similar to this one myself.

Well humanoidlord references any and all claims of alien contact, lunches with aliens, spider crab aliens skittering across the road, etc., as fact - he apparently believes every single crazy alien story on the internet without the slightest skepticism. And what's worse - he credulously holds the most crazy stories up as evidence to support his Loki god notion. It seems to be incomprehensible to him that a lot of people love to make up crazy stories either to see how many idiots will actually believe them, or for a few minutes of undeserved attention. Some people are tricksters. No "extradimensional" omnipotent divine being with a perverse sense of humor required.

That's a counterfactual statement. Nobody can reasonably "reckon" how many visitations are "far too many" in a situation where we potentially have billions of neighboring civilizations that may have a capacity to travel here with the ease that you and I get take-out for lunch, and any number of them may have active on-going surveillance operations or other agendas here on our planet.

But I think that when you cull the data with some semblance of responsible skepticism and the various filters of misidentifications and military planes and so forth, then the number of actual AAV sightings is probably fairly small - because we know that 80-95+% of all "unidentified" flying object sightings are actually mundane things; the AAV portion that seems to represent nonhuman technology is probably less than 5% (possibly even less than 1%) of the total "UFO" data set.

That's a twisted argument: first you malign the people who assign hocus-pocus explanations to the Skinwalker Ranch incidents or stories or whathaveyou, as well as Bigfoot (and I agree with this part - abandoning scientific reasoning is always a bad idea - and I raise objections whenever anybody raises this specter of superstition), but then you turn around and argue in favor of the idea that UFOs could be "something else" masquerading as solid aerial devices with surprisingly consistent performance characteristics.

Make up your mind. If you think it's silly and reckless to make up hand-wavy factless non-scientific explanations like "Precognitive Sentient Phenomenon" (which reads like meaningless word salad) for Skinwalker Ranch and Bigfoot, then it's silly and reckless to do the same thing with AAV reports.

Physical events have physical causes. And I see zero reason to think that if you see a large metallic disc hovering over the treeline and then dart out of view in the blink of an eye, that you saw something other than a large metallic disc hovering over the treeline that then darted out of view in the blink of an eye. Questioning our own unambivalent sensory perceptions is the road to madness (and absolutely awful explanatory hypotheses).

Nobody can reasonably "reckon" how many visitations are "far too many" in a situation

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Oh please. What I am saying is that there have been decades of total horseshit regarding UFO sightings and we still have video of people oooo-ing and ahhhh-ing at video and pictures that have obvious explanations. And over time the descriptions of what's being seen has changed. UFOlogy is largely grist for the mill for sociologists. How you can possibly winkle out that small fraction and determine that 'nope - it was in the cesspool with all the other shit but this one's clean!!' is an interesting thing to ponder.

You are proceeding from the assumption that we have been visited. I think it's possible, maybe even likely but to date there is zero proof, and pointing to the secret hidey-hole that the military keeps the 'good stuff' in isn't proof it's more conjecture. Massive amounts of sightings and reports isn't proof of anything other than that people make reports.

I think @humanoidlord is just pulling your leg to get a rise out of you (and apparently succeeding) but I also think that at some level he has a point; we ought to at least keep our minds open to to other possibilities. Nothing wrong with putting forth a theory and investing time in it, but consider that the actual 'answer' could have more to it than you may have anticipated.

By the way, Robert Bigelow has a similar interest and has invested far more money than you or I ever will into researching all sorts of things and look at all the progress that's been made in that regard. And they did have UFO sightings - brilliant orbs, flying refrigerators, etc at the Ranch to contend with. And the answer was .... Precognitive Sentient Phenomenon anyone?

What I found interesting is that no one has made any comparison of what John Alexander and Colm Kelleher had to say about their Skinwalker findings and the Ultradimensional Hypothesis or whatever it's called. Sounds like the same thing to me. Somehow when they say something couched in ten dollar words they get a pass, yet when someone else uses ten cent words to articulate pretty much the same thing well then, they are clearly misguided nitwits. Didn't Jacques Vallee say something like 'if it were just aliens visiting in spacecraft he'd be disappointed?' ETH sounds like a narrowly anthropomorphic view. I think it's probably the most likely but also can't help but think that we are necessarily looking at this through our own lens and are missing something.

Incidentally - if I want to 'malign' something I am perfectly capable. Mostly I am just bored and looking to stir the pot, not get into a online pissing contest.

I honestly don't know what to make of NIDS and Skinwalker. I don't think much of 'handy wavy word salad' as applied to cryptids and the like, and if it weren't for the apparent credibility of those involved at Skinwalker wouldn't think much of it. But I also don't think much of weaving together a theory by parsing data largely taken from eyewitness reports and then deciding that Eureka! The Answer is Here.

Some excellent points there, pf. The UFO field and the larger, more general area of "paranormal" events often remind me of the parable of the blind men and the elephant. Everyone seems to have a favorite hobby horse, but in order to remain faithful to it, one must ignore huge portions of the available data. It all just doesn't add up, and it never has. I think that fact should be leading us to learn to ask the right questions, but mostly we just defend our chosen turf. I like the idea that there is really no contradiction in aliens coming here from elsewhere, by various means including interdimensional travel. Really, if there is a civilization on a planet a thousand light years from here, and representatives of it manage to get here somehow, does it really matter if we call their method FTL or interdimensional? Isn't their planet essentially in a different dimension? I know that will raise some hackles, especially from people who love math mainly because there is only ever one right answer. It might even make the Star Trek universe unravel, Loki forbid!

To me, people like Vallee are the ones dealing with the whole topic, and not just the kinds of carefully curated data sets most people seem to be comfortable with. He and Hynek joined the Rosicrucians in the 60s. They explored psychic phenomena. They were, I believe, the first prominent UFO researchers to publicly articulate the idea that UFOs might originate in alternate dimensions. Nuts and bolts fundamentalists drive him up a wall, but he is also very interested in current efforts to analyze materials possibly from other worlds. He doesn't ignore data, let alone deny the validity (or even the existence) of whole classes of experience.